Ok, I'm sorry, I'll stop mangling song lyrics. My point, which has been made many times before, is that MTV used to be truly cutting edge. Madonna's performance of "Like A Virgin" at the first VMAs is a classic moment in US pop culture. Clearly my research is not in depth enough to back this statement up, but I have a feeling that the Music Video Awards were just created as a ploy to try to get ratings for another "alternative" awards show.
Of course I shouldn't remotely try to grapple with all of my thoughts on MTV at once, but it did host one of my favorite shows, the animated series Daria. Daria was nerdy, awkward, shy, painfully smart, had a kick-ass artsy best friend, and they were pretty much better than anyone else, adults or kids, boys or girls. In short, I worshipped her. She also had a little sister, Quinn, who was a popular airhead. At some point MTV forgot that Quinn was the butt of the jokes and started believing her and her kind were more important than the Darias of the world.
The VMAs every year still make a pathetic attempt to be cutting edge, elude to being the home of Daria, not to mention Bevis and Butthead, but the shock value of edgy, skimpy clothes, unrehearsed stunts, and iconoclastic performances have disappeared in a world where each reality show flounders so constantly to find a new edge (little people making chocolate! Sisters bikini waxing each other!) that we don't remember what scintillating feels like anymore.
So VMAs meek sister show, which I don't think ever tried to be much more scandalous than having a "best kiss" category, has become so empty that the entire show is just ad layered on ad. The presenters? All there to promote their movie that's out, or their movie that's coming out, or their movie that we haven't heard about but they're building up suspense for. Or maybe they're there to promote a new album. Whatever it is, they're there to promote something. The entire show seemed to be just one big ad for the Twilight series, from the Twilight stars' close ups at the very top of the show, to the finale of the show: a "sneak peek" at the preview for the next movie. I normally can't stand how even good actors turn in achingly hollow performances reading their lines in the "banter" that happens between presenters in other awards shows, but at least in other shows they're there, nominally, for the sake of being there, for the honor of presenting the award. No one was there for the sake of being there, except for maybe the fans, but seeing as there were absolutely no shots of them, I'm not convinced they were even there.
I thought that there was going to way too much in the show for me to write about it all. But it was just incredibly boring. There were of course lots and lots of penis jokes, bathroom humor, and, of course, sexist jokes (also the seemingly now obligatory two straight women kissing), but not much to write home about. The stand out to me was Aziz Ansari as a pretty amusing host, something I've rarely seen pulled off.
The only truly interesting thing was the absence of reality TV. There was every kind of celebrity in attendance, even Shaun White, the Olympic gold medalist. But I didn't catch a glimpse of a single reality TV star, or any reference to reality TV at all. In another twist I can't quite figure out, the producer of the show, Mark Burnett, is the same the British producer who introduced that special competitive breed of reality television to the US, starting with Survivor. Come now, wouldn't it have been entertaining for him to bring in one of the many washed up musicians turned reality stars such as Flava Flav or Brett Michaels? After all, isn't an awards show just another reality show?
Perhaps, just perhaps, Burnett thought that the only way to wring any last drops of surprise out of the show was to go retro, and actually celebrate (mostly incredibly bad) art; in essence, the be a regular awards show. I think the show was such a failure because the great allure of an awards shows used to be getting to see celebrities not perform, supposedly getting some glimpse into who they really are. Watching these shows, we don't feel special, like someone has slipped us a back stage pass, anymore when we get to see something that seems behind the scenes. We assume and demand it, it is in everything we read and everything we watch.
Stay tuned, I'm sure, for the MTV Reality TV Show Awards.
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